Linuxpakistan.net is proud to announce the deployment of it's belated news server. This server will allow all users to submit interesting articles to the admins, who will then use their discretion and post all worthy news items. This server, running a modified version of drupal, has Urdu localization, a news aggregator, and a members blog aggregator. We have migrated over existing contents that we used to have on the postnuke install from before.

We hope to provide all users with current blogs with a means to share their thoughts directly with other LP.net members. We also have a book feature that will allow us to maintain collaborative documents. We encourage all to participate in a productive manner.

Surely this will help to bring the community closer together so that more fun and interesting projects can be created for the spread of OSS solutions
within Pakistan.

At this time we hope you check out the site and let us know what you think.

Dr-Munir, If things work the way I intended them to (there's little chance of that happening ), you should be able to post documents from your account on the /news site. They should get dropped into a submission queue for publishing. For collaborative book editing, I have made a special group that's allowed to edit book pages. A book has to be started by one of the admins, and any member of that book editors group can edit pages in it. I'm new to drupal myself, so we'll all have to figure out how to use it as we go along.

Other help I'll need includes localizing the site into urdu. As you can see, very few strings (22% to be exact) have been localized. If you're interested in localizing the other strings, let me know (that means you, jess ).

This is major news. My linguistic skills are really poor, the bit of advocacy I do is really based on need rather than any competency in the language. I sure will try to help with Urdu localization. We should be able to make use of translation material that has been accumulating on the net.

The drupal system has a very nice web based interface for doing localization. You can search for strings you'd like to localize, and it tells you the context where that string is being used. You can just type in the urdu equivalent of the string in that context, and it is used. One nice feature is that it can export and import standard GNU gettext .po files for the localization, making reuse across sites a lot easier.